Australian Centre on China in the World, the Australian National University
Date: 25 March 2021
Time: 4:15–5.30pm AEDT
This is a hybrid event (online and in-person). It is free and open to the public, registration is essential.
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The Lunheng 論衡 is known to tradition as a cantankerous, mud-slinging sort of text. It takes aim at the beliefs of its day, from everyday popular superstitions all the way up to the teachings of Confucius and Mencius. Outraged defenders of tradition have for generations accused Wang Chong of hypocrisy, since his positive views often seem no better supported than the views he argues against. By contrast, defenders of Wang Chong have hailed his “critical spirit” and celebrate what are construed as his successes of rationality, such as his critique of the idea that heaven rewards the good and punishes the bad. In this talk, I try to give a sense of what this so-called “critical spirit” actually is—not just a personality trait, I will claim, but the reflection of an underlying theory of knowledge. My previous work on the topic (Klein&Klein 2016) has with some justice been criticised for resorting to concepts that would have been quite alien to Wang Chong’s intellectual context.
In this talk, therefore, I attempt the somewhat more solidly grounded project of reconstructing the Lunheng’s theory of knowledge from an emic perspective, analysing the epistemic terms and concepts Wang Chong himself relies on and how they seem to relate to one another. I will focus primarily on shí 實, but as the title suggests, other terms relating to knowledge (shì 事, xìao 效, lǐ 理, lùn 論, and of course zhī 知) will have important roles to play in this reconstruction of Wang Chong’s background epistemic theory.
About the Speaker
Dr Esther Sunkyung Klein (PhD Princeton, East Asian Studies) researches pre-modern Chinese historiography, philosophy, and literature. Her monograph Reading Sima Qian from Han to Song: the Father of History in Pre-modern China was published in 2019. She has also published on the authorship of the Zhuangzi, Wang Chong’s epistemology, and other issues relating to the history and transmission of ideas. Her current project focuses on approaches to truth and evidence in premodern China, including both the philosophical and historiographical traditions. Issues include methods for critical evaluation of evidence, approaches to contradiction and disagreement, and issues of bias and subjectivity in the representation of ‘truths’.